New York Heritagehttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog
Wed, 18 Mar 2015 08:00:18 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1International Women’s Dayhttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2015/03/18/international-womens-day/
http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2015/03/18/international-womens-day/#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 08:00:18 +0000Eric Alanhttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/?p=590March 8th is International Women’s Day, a global day celebrating the economic, political, and social achievements of women past, present, and future. The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Make It Happen,” and part of that is the celebration and education of women’s achievements. Here at New York Heritage, it is understood [...]]]>March 8th is International Women’s Day, a global day celebrating the economic, political, and social achievements of women past, present, and future. The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Make It Happen,” and part of that is the celebration and education of women’s achievements. Here at New York Heritage, it is understood that by better understanding our past we can make a better future. Luckily, in New York State, there is a rich history of women with outstanding achievements in many areas.

The College of Saint Rose is an excellent collection to start delving into. This college was founded in 1920 by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet as a Roman Catholic college for women. Contained within the college’s archives are yearbooks, candid pictures of the students, and the student publication, the Canary Trills.

Women were prominent in the halls of the medical profession, as shown in the Lourdes Hospital collection. This collection contains photos and the Diary of the Daughters of Charity. This diary spans thirty years, and contains descriptions of the building of various areas of the hospital, correspondence of the staff, and a list of all of the nursing students that passed through those halls during that time frame. The women who served at Lourdes were integral to the health and successful recovery of all of the patients who passed through.

New York’s history in the sporting world contains many famous women. Ithaca College had a bowling alley in the basement of Hill Center, which spawned one of the first women’s sports at Ithaca College.

Lake Placid, one of the centers of world speed skating, had many famous female speed skaters, including Elsie Muller, who set the world record for multiple speed skating races and went on to compete in the Olympics.

Feel free to explore the collections in New York Heritage to discover even more successful women, and how they have changed the shape of New York and its rich history.

In the months that the Empire State Digital Network (ESDN)* has been in operation here in New York, we’ve made significant progress and have put the necessary pieces in place to contribute New York’s digital cultural heritage to the Digital [...]]]>

By Chris Stanton, ESDN Metadata Specialist, Metropolitan New York Library Council

In the months that the Empire State Digital Network (ESDN)* has been in operation here in New York, we’ve made significant progress and have put the necessary pieces in place to contribute New York’s digital cultural heritage to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). ESDN is currently finishing up our first ingest of content to DPLA and we’re looking ahead to growing New York content in DPLA throughout 2015. To accomplish this, we’ve been working closely with our NY3Rs Regional Liaisons and cultural heritage institutions across New York to build workflows for aggregating content, performing necessary remediations and exposing metadata records in one stream for harvest by our colleagues at DPLA.

DPLA is a national digital library that aggregates metadata for digital objects from libraries, museums, archives and other cultural heritage institutions from around the country. Those resources are discoverable through the DPLA portal (including timeline and map features!) as well as through the DPLA API. Metadata records are contributed under a CC0 license and are freely available on the DPLA site, encouraging innovative reuse of contributed metadata.

As our content continues to be contributed to large-scale aggregated projects like the DPLA it becomes increasingly important that the rights statements assigned to that content are appropriate and easy to understand and interpret, regardless of context. By improving the accuracy of rights statements assigned to our collections, we increase the probability that our collections will be used appropriately and to their maximum extent.

So, as you might expect, we’ve been thinking a lot about rights and rights

statements. And, as you’re also probably not surprised to hear, we’re not alone in that.

This past August, Rick Anderson from the University of Utah wrote an excellent and timely column for Library Journal on permissions and the publishing of library and archival content. His discussion of the issues surrounding “permission to publish” will hopefully serve as both a wake-up call and a rallying cry for institutions throughout the country (and, if we and our colleagues around the state have anything to say about it, most certainly New York!). The comments section also includes a useful discussion that might even convince you to have a look at your own rights and permissions statements sooner rather than later (hint: please do this).

The rights we claim in our collections are often needlessly restrictive, placing an unnecessary barrier on the use of our collection material. To borrow from Anderson, we’re too often “asserting rights we don’t have.” Many institutions seem to be falling into the “prior written permission needed” camp when it would seem as though no such right to require permission exists. And, possibly most importantly, the courts have reminded us that we should probably rethink this stance (see here and here).

From the ESDN perspective, the discussion that emanated from Anderson’s article was incredibly timely. As we’ve been working with our initial contributors and partners, we’ve found that determining rights and assigning rights statements is tricky, statements come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s just complicated for our partners. And, as we’re all aware, addressing issues related to rights at our institutions is not a quick or painless process (nor does anyone expect it to be!). ESDN is planning to help facilitate work with our partners to help address these concerns as we move into 2015, and we hope to soon formulate guidelines to aid in assigning appropriate rights statements in our partner collections.

Thankfully, DPLA, Europeana and selected partners are also working to ease some of the confusion and uneasiness we’ve all felt at times about rights and the assigning of rights statements in our collections. The rights labeling infrastructure they are working to put in place will help institutions to confidently and accurately assign appropriate and interoperable rights statements in our collections. Best practices will be established and guidance on the tricky situations we’ve all encountered (think orphan works) will be provided. Please take a look at the relevant Knight News Challenge submission and this blog post from DPLA’s Emily Gore for further information about this important work, and stay tuned for output from this project in the coming months.

In the meantime, having a less-than-ideal rights statement won’t keep you from contributing your data to ESDN and DPLA. In fact, we only require two descriptive fields for contribution at the moment: title and rights. Of course, it’s likely that you’re going to want to include a bit more than that, but those fields are all that are absolutely required (for additional information, please see the ESDN Metadata Requirements).

Determining the status of collection objects and assigning appropriate rights statements is not easy. This is a perfect opportunity to work together to improve data quality and openness through the correct assignation of rights statements in our collections. Those of us here at the Empire State Digital Network and our partners around the state, want (and will eventually need) to address these issues, and we’re in a great position to do that in the coming year.

For ESDN news, announcements and information, please visit the ESDN project website, http://metro.org/esdn, and also follow ESDN on Twitter, @NYSdigital.

*New York State’s service hub for the Digital Public Library of America

New York Heritage is pleased to welcome the Mendon Public Library as our newest contributor! Located in Honeoye Falls, the library was originally formed in 1912 as the Honeoye Falls Free Library by the women of the Fortnightly Club of Honoeye Falls. In 1935 it was incorporated as the Honoeye Falls Library, Inc. [...]]]>

New York Heritage is pleased to welcome the Mendon Public Library as our newest contributor! Located in Honeoye Falls, the library was originally formed in 1912 as the Honeoye Falls Free Library by the women of the Fortnightly Club of Honoeye Falls. In 1935 it was incorporated as the Honoeye Falls Library, Inc. When the Mendon Public Library was established in 1968, the Honeoye Falls Library was dissolved and its assets were transferred to the new Mendon library.

A variety of local history references are available within the library for those interested in exploring the historical roots of Mendon, its surrounding communities, and the city of Rochester.

Their first digital collection available on New York Heritage is the Honeoye Falls – Lima Yearbooks Collections. It contains a pictorial record of the Honeoye Falls – Lima School District. You can view school yearbooks from 1954 through 2009.

]]>http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2015/02/13/new-collection-honeoye-falls-lima-yearbooks/feed/0Sacred Places: Churches around Buffalohttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2015/01/23/sacred-places-churches-around-buffalo/
http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2015/01/23/sacred-places-churches-around-buffalo/#commentsFri, 23 Jan 2015 17:14:38 +0000Claire Enkoskyhttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/?p=460The Buffalo History Museum has some great digital initiatives, some of which are proudly featured on New York Heritage. Earlier this year, they hosted an intern who replicated a 1901 map done by the Charity Organization Society of Buffalo in a modern setting: Google maps!

You can see the interactive map [...]]]>

The Buffalo History Museum has some great digital initiatives, some of which are proudly featured on New York Heritage. Earlier this year, they hosted an intern who replicated a 1901 map done by the Charity Organization Society of Buffalo in a modern setting: Google maps!

Yep, it’s once again that time of year (okay, it’s the first time ever) when New York Heritage digs deep into its treasures and pulls out a piece of handwriting to admire. To wit, we give you the musings of one Miss Jessie Elvira Jenks (age 12) of Oneonta, New York, telling us how she and her family celebrated the New Year way back in the mid-1880s:

Diary, page 5

Diary, Page 6

Do you know any twelve year olds who write like this now?

Hmmm…hard to read, right? Well, thanks to the fine folks at the Greater Oneonta Historical Society and the Milne Library at SUNY Oneonta, the handwriting is deciphered and searchable within New York Heritage Digital Collections. Below, a transcript for those first few entries of 1886:

January 1st, Friday 1886. Goodmorning 86, How do you do. I got 6 cents, an old white skirt to make dolls clothes of, and a wide long white ribbon. Grandpa and Grandma got here about 11 o’clock. Uncle Elwood started for Aunt Lura’s this morning. Uncle Jay was sick so they could not come. I wrote four New Year letters, one to Effie, to Emeline, to Aunt Lura and to Bessie.

Wednesday 2nd. Grandma gave mama a salt cellar (or bottle, or box) for a New Years present. they went away about 10,30 o’clock. I went over to Uncle Newtons and got the mail this morning. I got a “St. Nickolas” and a “Youth Companion”, a letter from Jennie and one from Effie. Papa got the “Witness”, “Herald”, and “Farmer and Darimen”. also an alamanac. Mama got her “Chautauquan”. I sent a New Years letter to Cousin Lizzie Connitt I sent a bag of Walnuts to Arthur. We 6 [illegible number] drove up to Altons a little while this afternoon Mrs. Bergen was there; I think she is about the fattest woman I ever saw.

January 3rd, Sunday, 1886. I had the “Sunday reading” in the Chautauquan, and 50 pages in “the Bible in ^[the] Nineteenth Century” on which I took notes; I will copy them here they are expressed in my own language. “New views ought not to be accepted because few men say they should; but, because they are more reasonable than the old ones. The Bible is in harmony with sience when correctly interpeted. The microscope can reveal nothing that does not show Gods work. Every man has his own characteristics. Caution is necessary in the interpetation of the Bible.” I am writing to Jennie. I have been up to Aunt Nancys a few minutes.

9th Saturday. Mr. and Mrs Gallup had a supprise party last night. they have married 40 years. [...]

[Emphasis and paragraph separation added.]

Want to read more of Jessie’s adventures? Ready to witness the sometimes difficult transition to adolescence as it happened in the late 19th century? Or maybe you simply want to know how Wednesday follows Friday? (no answers to the last one…)

The full diary is available here. Miss Jenks kept the diary from November 10 1885 through December 31, 1888, starting when she was 12 years old.

The digitized version of this diary was published by the Milne Library at SUNY Oneonta and is part of the Papers of Jessie Elvira Jenks at the Greater Oneonta Historical Society. This diary, along with letters written to Willard S. Jenks and his wife, Rhoda, from their daughter, Jessie, is part of a larger collection which was donated to the Greater Oneonta Historical Society by the Jenks family. In addition to the letters and three journals Jessie kept, there were teaching contracts, report cards, recommendations, resumes, newspaper clippings, and stacks of letters from 1892 to 1894 and 1930. Jessie lived from 1873-1964.

Extending the spirit of National Handwriting Day, check out this letter from the Sherwood Collection at the Delaware County Historical Association, in which Laura Sherwood encourages her son John to work at his penmanship while attending Yale University.

]]>http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2015/01/23/happy-national-handwriting-day/feed/0Colorizing the Pasthttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/06/18/colorizing-the-past/
http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/06/18/colorizing-the-past/#commentsWed, 18 Jun 2014 16:20:58 +0000Claire Enkoskyhttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/?p=499I recently learned how to colorize black-and-white photographs with a course on Lynda.com (thanks for the opportunity, NY 3Rs Association!). Naturally, I put these new-found skills to use on some of the wonderful old photographs accessible on New York Heritage.

Choosing a collection to pluck photos from was difficult; there are so [...]]]>

Choosing a collection to pluck photos from was difficult; there are so many and they all have gems! After falling down the rabbit hole of browsing collections, I decided on the George W. Fenner World War I Photographs of Syracuse, NY, a collection from the Onondaga County Public Library’s Local History & Genealogy Department.

Fenner was a staff photographer for the local paper in Syracuse and these professional-quality photos of his show how Central New York responded to the Great War.

These men are both clergymen: Pastor Frederick W. Betts and Rev. George S. Mahon. Betts was born in Illinois but came to New York to study at St. Lawrence University from 1884 to 1885. He moved to Syracuse to become the minister of the First Church, a position he held until his death in 1932. (Incidentally, he served as president on the Board of Syracuse Public Library, so we are particularly grateful for his civic contributions). Mahon was the founding Roman Catholic priest of the Church of the Holy Rosary in 1913 on the west side of Syracuse and served his parish until his death in 1930.

But what might they have looked like in color?! These proud Syracuse citizens became my dignified colorization guinea pigs.

Can you tell what the tricks of colorizing are? Step one was to increase the dynamic range, making whites whiter and blacks blacker. Step two was to clean up the scratches and dust that are inherent with scanned images of 100 year old photos. Step three, the most intensive and time consuming, is to treat your cleaned up image in Photoshop like a coloring book from your childhood. Using pens, brushes, and layers, you can colorize areas and then fiddle with the result using hue & saturation levels.

Admittedly, my final products are not of expert quality, but they were fun to make and, I hope, pose as a reminder that these black and white photographs were of real, living people in the not-so-very-distant past.

This woman was photographed by Fenner during the 1917 Fourth of July Parade in Syracuse. Each star on her flag represents a son; she had five boys in service during World War I. This photograph appeared on page 3 of the Syracuse Herald on Monday Evening, November 26, 1917.

Proud as I may be of my new coloring skills, I still have a while to go before I can do in Photoshop what some people did so well by hand:

Mrs. Packard, a matriarch of the wealthy Packard family of Lakewood, NY, was brought to colorful life the old fashioned way, with colored pencils and time.

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http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/06/18/colorizing-the-past/feed/0Recording Disasters: Floods of 1913http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/06/12/recording-disasters-floods-of-1913/
http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/06/12/recording-disasters-floods-of-1913/#commentsThu, 12 Jun 2014 18:30:11 +0000Claire Enkoskyhttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/?p=480Generally, New York State is a quiet place. We’re not tornado central, our earthquakes are pretty tame, and it’s been a long time since a tsunami has reached Oneonta.

That said, we have had our fair share of terrible storms and consequential floods. A lot of those floods from the 20th Century were documented carefully [...]]]>

Generally, New York State is a quiet place. We’re not tornado central, our earthquakes are pretty tame, and it’s been a long time since a tsunami has reached Oneonta.

That said, we have had our fair share of terrible storms and consequential floods. A lot of those floods from the 20th Century were documented carefully and are now available on New York Heritage.

In early 1913, a severe winter storm hit the Eastern, Midwest, and Southern parts of the United States. It was the most geographically widespread natural disaster the United States had suffered up to that point in its history, and the effects of the storm reverberated.

The March 1913 floods were so severe in other parts of the country that Salvation Army members from New York City traveled to Dayton, Ohio to help out:

Why head to Dayton? A 1913 issue of the Westfield Republican newspaper reported on March 26th that “the mayor of Dayton… has telegraphed that 5,000 perished in his city in the flood after the breaking of the levees of the Big Miami river.” Furthermore, according to the article, three-quarters of the city were underwater, and a substantial number of buildings were on fire. 100 years later, we know that fewer than 500 Daytonians actually lost their lives, but that’s still a whole lot!

But in New York State, engineering prevailed against Mother Nature in many places. In Rochester, the aqueduct once declared the longest stone bridge in America survived the flooding of March 1913. The Rochester Museum & Science Center collection includes some images of this aqueduct holding back the swirling Genesee waters.

]]>http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/06/12/recording-disasters-floods-of-1913/feed/0Albany Public Libraryhttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/05/14/albany-public-library/
http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/05/14/albany-public-library/#commentsWed, 14 May 2014 15:15:43 +0000Claire Enkoskyhttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/?p=463Albany Public Library is happy to have recently joined NY Heritage! Though our collection will grow over time, we have already made some very interesting objects available. We would like to highlight “A Bicentennial of Albany Views: 1963-1967 and 1974-1975 Compared.”

This album of photographs was handmade by Florence L. Powell, a [...]]]>

This album of photographs was handmade by Florence L. Powell, a Historical Research Assistant for the City of Albany, in 1976. Urban renewal is a blanket term for programs, largely initiated by the Federal government, which demolished and rebuilt large sections of America’s urban environments. Highways, office buildings, parking structures, and civic centers often replaced historic buildings, low-rise housing, and private businesses. In Albany, the construction of Interstate 787 is the most visible and lasting evidence of urban renewal. The commensurate destruction of older buildings and reshaping of streets is documented in Powell’s work.

In the mid-1960s, Powell was a resident of the Clinton Square neighborhood of Albany, the area where North Pearl Street and Broadway meet Clinton Avenue. By 1963, demolition of buildings had begun as part of the urban renewal projects initiated across America by the federal government. Powell said she felt that, “one of these days there would be those who would want to know what the old area had looked like, and that there should be a permanent record of the area.” With this impetus, she “began in leisure moments and at weekends” to take photographs of the streets and buildings in the Clinton Square neighborhood.

In 1975, Powell covered the same ground with her camera and her dog, a collie named “Blackie,” and took photographs of the same locations- where those locations still existed. The effects of the urban renewal projects in Albany, which changed the character of neighborhoods, are shown in the side-by-side images of Powell’s album. At the urging of future NYS Assemblyman Jack McEneny, Powell assembled the pictures into an album and distributed five copies. One of those albums now resides in Albany Public Library’s Pruyn Collection of Albany History and online at NY Heritage.

For any researcher or layperson seeking to understand the effects of urban renewal on a neighborhood, Powell’s album is a must. And as Powell notes, “Besides being historically interesting, the whole project has been a most pleasant pursuit for me, and of course for my collie, ‘Blackie,’ who was my guard in isolated places making the entire project possible.” We hope your time on Albany Public Library’s NY Heritage Collections is a pursuit as eye-opening as Powell’s.

If you are interested in seeing what this part of Albany looks like today, mark September 13 on your calendar for a walking tour this fall! The Albany Heritage Area Visitors Center, Albany City Historian Tony Opalka, and staff from thePruyn Collection of Albany History at the Albany Public Library worked together to create a walking tour inspired by Powell’s photo album.

Before the walking tour, we’ll examine the dramatic streetscape changes captured by the photographer, Florence L. Powell, a historical research assistant for the city of Albany, and learn about the buildings and entire city blocks demolished in the process. We’ll then go on a 30 minute walk to retrace the footsteps of the photographer, learn about the neighborhood today, and note any new changes that have developed over the last 40 years.

]]>http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/05/14/albany-public-library/feed/0Albany Collections in the Newshttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/05/08/albany-collections-in-the-news/
http://www.nyheritage.org/blog/2014/05/08/albany-collections-in-the-news/#commentsThu, 08 May 2014 14:07:51 +0000Claire Enkoskyhttp://www.nyheritage.org/blog/?p=447The Albany area is well represented in New York Heritage and lately, some of these great collections have been featured on All Over Albany, a great website that highlights special things about and to do in the Capital region.

In April, the site explored the recently added Albany Public Library collection from their Pruyn [...]]]>

This collection is made up of images from 1920 to 1950, showing off views of the city.

Then this past week, the site pointed to another collection, the Steinmetz Digital Collection of Schenectady, a collaboration of the miSci Museum of Innovation and Science (formerly know as: the Schenectady Museum of & Suits-Bueche Planetarium), Schenectady County Historical Society, and Edison-Steinmetz Center.

Steinmetz was General Electric’s chief engineer in the 1890s and into the 1900s. Here he is pictured with Thomas Edison in 1922:

The first award, given to the Cortland County Historical Society, will provide $1,044 to digitize the Society’s large collection of Brockway Company-related images currently in one of several formats (35 mm b&w and color film, 3X5 medium format negatives, 4×5 large format negatives). The entire collection totals more than 1,000 images.

According to CCHS Director Mindy Leisenring, “the Brockway Company produced trucks until 1977.

Mack Truck, which had purchased the family-owned business in 1956, then closed the Cortland manufacturing facility, which had been a critical economic driver for the community. Its reputation had spread as trucks manufactured in Cortland were purchased by companies and municipalities worldwide.

As such, the company’s archives, including the digital images this grant will make possible, is an important resource for studies investigating twentieth-century deindustrialization, globalization and workplace history.”

SUNY Oneonta is already an active participant on New York Heritage. Their collection can be found here. DCHA has already begun digitization, including the fantastic Bob Wyer photography collection, one of which is shown at the right.

According to Project Director Andy Perry, Head of Library Technology at Milne Library, “DCHA and GOHS both house unique primary source materials unavailable elsewhere.

For example, the Sherwood collection, located in the DCHA archives, provides valuable insight into the daily lives of people in antebellum New York. Attorney Samuel Sherwood (1779-1862) was a U.S. Congressman (1813-1815) from Delhi, NY. The family moved to New York City in 1830 but continued to spend summers in Delhi.

An example of the rich content included in this collection is the 1823 travel diary of Laura Sherwood. The diary describes people, scenery, accommodations, and villages as the Sherwood family travelled on horseback from Delhi to Canada.”

In addition, this project will provide valuable experience for SUNY Oneonta students who may be considering future careers as archivists.